Is strategic management in your business model?

I have had a lot of progressive leadership role models in my career. I recently had a conversation with a businessperson who did not understand his company’s loss of market-share. That conversation concluded as less of a mystery and more proof of the need for strategic management.

Liam Fahey and Robert Randall, in their book “The Portable MBA in Strategy,” solidly define and argue strategic management as “the need to lay the foundation for success in tomorrow’s marketplace while competing to win in today’s marketplace.”

Unless your exit strategy is fully upon you, are you planning to win tomorrow through broad vision initiatives while also executing today? It would seem a simple question to work through, with results that do not just maintain the customer base but also find growth over a once-perceived stagnated base.

Our industry has a historic core-base that numbers support as gallon-growth challenged. However, those who are placing themselves strategically in positions to win in tomorrow’s marketplace are finding not just growth within the past-targeted base, but also new exponential gallon growth through executing forward-thinking initiatives on both obvious, and perhaps not so obvious, business opportunities.

Large or small, evaluate your company’s place in tomorrow’s marketplace. Strategic initiatives as economical as employee education, all the way through to more costly capital equipment planning, must be measured for your continued success.